create awesome Cascades Apps: attend workshop @ekkescorner

as you probably know I like to create awesome apps for BlackBerry 10 Cascades, but I also like to teach others and to give my experiences from daily work to other devs. last week I presented a 5 – Day – Workshop in Rosenheim.

before the workshop started …

After weeks of rain finally on saturday the sun comes back and immediately some attractions in the city for all the tourists:

photo taken 100 m from my home(office)

My workshops are always only for small groups of 4-6 developers to be effective and allow dynamic schedule: nothing is fixed, it depends from the developers knowledge and requirements what we’ll do. The goal: at the end all should be able to write their own apps.

This time attendees came from Munich, Nuremberg and also Liz coming from London, UK. As Liz arrived on Sonday weather changed again and we got hail:

Trainingscenter @ekkescorner

Workshop started on Monday at “Zur Historischen Weinlände”:

doesn’t really look like a trainings center 😉

but they’re equipped well with HDMI Beamer and best of all: a great cuisine and friendly team supporting us all over the week:

My workshops are no workshops to relax from your daily business work: be warned – you have to listen carefully and hack much code by yourself 😉

food for brain and more

Cascades: awesome food for your brain

surrounded by great food for your sense of taste

If you can get both: a great week is guaranteed !

my equipment

fortunately my home(office) is only some hundred meters away, so it’s easy to bring all the equipment you need as a mobile developer:

recently I did some work with external Bluetooth keyboards,Mouse and HDMI monitors connected to BlackBerry10 devices. I blogged about this here. In the meantime I also got a 10″ HDMI Monitor and used this one to demo HowTo use it in Cascades apps:

the workshop

First day I started to present my BuiltForBlackBerry APPs to demonstrate live what does it mean to have a TabbedPane, NavigationPane, Peek, InvocationFramework, Notifications, Custom Maps, Communication with Server, Dialogs, Toasts, ShortCuts, KeyListener and much more.

I did this all and want to transmit my experiences …

Every day we only had 1 – 2 hours slides and some theory …

… and then went over to hack the code.

My workshops are not a replacement for BlackBerry’s WebCasts where you can learn Cascades to become a BlackBerry Builder – these WebCasts are a great foundation to know what’s available and can be done with Cascades.

My workshops are focused to become a great developer and learn HowTo use all the frameworks, HowTo read the documentation, try things out, copy and modify code from samples. Cascades documentation is great and now all is integrated directly into the new Momentics 10.2 IDE. On the other side there are so many APIs, so many different areas of app-development you can be lost in space …

I went through the normal app – development – process and step-by-step we developed a Cascades APP from scratch. Designing a new mobile app it’s important to understand the Navigation Model…

… where Cascades provides TabbedPanes, NavigationPane, Pages, Sheet and ApplicationMenu. It’s important to understand this and to know HowTo use it for your specific apps. In such a small group of developers we can discuss those decisions and think about alternate ways.

As soon as you know HowTo navigate through your app, you should be aware of the ways to create your UI dynamically…

… this is more work to be done as developer, but your users will get a fast app with low memory consumption. If you know this from the beginning, it’s easy to follow.

We also went through the main UI Controls, UI Design and the cool Signals and Slots concept to connect events with handlers, where the difficult part was done by magic from Cascades – or better: by Qt MOC – Meta Object Compiler for you.

Coming from Java to C++ perhaps there’s the fear about creating and deleting objects without a Garbage Collection. Qt provides a cool concept of Parents to make all of this easy for you.

Every mobile application has to deal with Lists and underlying data models – and this is a really easy job using Cascades.

We also discussed what’s important to get apps certified as BuiltForBlackBerry and I explained the UI Guidelines and we did it in our app: per ex. to provide a SceneCover if the app will be minimized:

using images made at the workshop as minized Application Cover 😉

…hard work for developers new to Cascades or even to mobile development, but every day there was one break to get lunch 🙂

great food served

also in the morning some bavarian butter pretzels are waiting and later on some sweets:

Night Coding

Normaly learning new stuff and hacking code for 10 hours is more then enough. Here the Night-Coding comes in: it’s a special offer by me, free and optional. Perhaps you don’t believe: all developers also attended the night coding sessions !

… perhaps you understand the motivation if taking a look at the pictures below 🙂

Nightcoding is something like a free-style workshop: you can ask what you want, we can try things out …

…drink…

…enjoy some snacks…

discuss HowTo code …

be shocked by the awesome speed Cascades populates a list with 90,000 records ….

the app built from scratch

want to take a look at the app built from scratch by workshop attendees ? This is always the most curious part for me: I never know what kind of app we’ll build at a workshop – it depends from the requirements, questions, …